Scientist describes world without edges
DB: Kai Lee teaches environmental studies at Williams College in Massachusetts.
JB: Lee spends a lot of time thinking about how people interact with the world.
Kai Lee: Two hundred years ago, nearly everybody lived in a place whether they wanted to or not. That is, their water and their food, a lot of their information, the people that they knew, the people that they would marry or they would meet on the street everyday, they were all local. And in that sense, we all lived in a world which now we would describe as “bounded.”
DB: Now, as human society becomes increasingly globalized, we’re all connected in many ways to distant places.
Kai Lee: And that’s true of the clothing that I wear, which might be manufactured around the world or the food that I purchase from the supermarket, not to mention the information that I’m getting from the mass media each day. So I live in a world unlike my grandfather, who was a peasant in China, who lived a very bounded life, he probably never moved much farther than 50 miles away from his village. I live in a world in which I’m routinely connected to people thousands of miles away.
JB: Lee calls our modern world a “world without edges” – and he has more to say. For a transcript of our interview with Kai Lee, come to earthsky.org. That’s our show. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.
Visit Kai Lee’s homepage.
Kai Lee says we now live in a “world without edges”. In other words, we have become less and less connected to a particular place. “Now psychologically, however, I think we still think of ourselves in psychological and cultural terms that are inherited from this much more place-bound world with edges.” says Lee. “And so the world without edges is particularly treacherous because we don’t appreciate the way in which we are in fact connected to different places and we don’t even think about them.”
Read our full interview with Kai Lee
Our thanks to:
Kai Lee
Professor of Environmental Studies
Williams College
Williamstown, Massachusetts
